Memo to self:

Listening to a CD to get into the right mood to write is a good idea, but it must be done properly, particularly when one is trying to get into Hellblazer: Hogwarts mood/mode.

Listening to movie soundtracks often helps, as they generally have a unifying mood.
Listening to the soundtrack to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, however, is REALLY not a good idea.

When I get home and finish my job-application-related writing for the evening I'm putting on the soundtrack to Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. That's serious hurt-your-character music, which means it's perfect for John. Mind you the segment I have to write is the start-of-term feast and some Sorting stuff, possibly with some stuff from the first day of class, so it's not as if I need to make him suffer much. It's the principle of the thing, though. I'm not saying that John Constantine wouldn't do well in a pulp setting, it's just that he'd be in one with tentacled horrors and priests who really ought to be mad by now and maybe the Occult Bureau of Nazi Germany figuring out how to make their crap actually work. Not the kind of giant-robot pulp you get in Sky Captain.

Sinking realisation that struck me at lunch

I've just started playing Finrod Felagund, one of the more fascinating background characters in the Silmarillion, in an RPG called New Menegroth. It's MSN-based but there's an LJ community for it here and most of the characters to date have LJ's of their own... anyway. Here's the realisation:

Finrod is intelligent (he learns languages just by listening to them being spoken, because he can pick up the meaning of words from the speaker's mind), outgoing (he was on a hunting trip when he overheard human voices for the first time and went over and made friends with them despite never having seen their species), fond of humans (made friends with them, sang for them, taught them Sindarin, got them homes, accepted some into his service), fiercely loyal (he left Aman only because he felt family ought to stick together, and Feanor was his uncle, not to mention that he left his kingdom to help Beren in the quest for the Silmaril because he felt duty-bound to the descendants of his former vassal), protective (despite being chained himself he fought Sauron's werewolf with his bare hands to keep it from killing Beren), and blond (his grand-mum was Indis of the Vanyar, who passed on golden-hair genes to her descendants, particularly Finrod's sister Galadriel).

He's a yellow bloody Labrador retriever.

(ETA: Oh, and he gets mopey when he can't be with his particular people, either. His beloved Amarie didn't come with him into Middle-earth, so he never married and claimed to have a foresight flash of a grim fate that kept him from turning to someone else. Right, honey. We all know you were secretly hoping that if you lay on the rug and stared at the door long enough, she'd come walking through. And jeez! One of his names was Friend-of-Men! That's barely a step removed from Man's-Best-Friend...)